Water and Debris Flows

Landslides often occur in response to heavy or prolonged rainfall. On hillsides,

gravity is constantly working to pull the soil and rock downslope, and rainfall
infiltrating into the ground changes the forces or stresses acting on those hillside
materials. If the changes in stress are large enough to overcome the strength of
the hillside materials, a landslide occurs. "Debris flows" are a type of landslide
initiated by heavy rainfall or rapid snowmelt; the name "debris flow" is derived
from the mixture of coarse sediment that geologists call "debris" and water
picked up and carried when they flow downslope or down a stream channel.
When they happen, debris flows can move rapidly and travel long distances with
tremendous momentum. If they occur where people and things are located they
cause damage to buildings, block transportation routes, and sometimes kill or
injure people. The USGS landslide scientists are trying to find better ways to
determine when rainfall might cause debris flows in order to reduce their danger.

In the Past...
The link between heavy or prolonged rainfall and shallow landslides has been
known for decades and began to be quantified in the late 1970s. With no
monitoring instruments, however, the only data that existed were from rain gages
that might be several miles from the landslides, and observations or eye-witness
accounts of when landslides occurred. An eyewitness of a landslide is not
common, and even if they are known to have happened, their occurrence is
usually only known to the nearest day or so. In addition, the condition of the soil
before the rainstorm, whether relatively dry or wet, was unknown. As a result, the
links between the amount of rainfall and the timing of landslides have been
inexact.

Using this inexact data, correlations known as rainfall thresholds have been
developed. Rainfall thresholds are the most common tool used to forecast
landslide occurrence even though their accuracy is limited due to the nature of
the data.

Monitoring Hillslopes
The USGS has operated near real-time hillslope hydrologic monitoring stations in
several locations across the continental U.S. for about 10 years with the goal of
eventually establishing an early warning system for debris flows in cooperation
with the National Weather Service. The current sites are located in Oregon,
California, and North Carolina. The stations monitor rainfall and track the amount
and movement of water in the upper few meters of the hillside. Some also have
 instruments to detect ground movement indicative of landslides. Most of these
stations are operated in cooperation with universities, state and local government
agencies or other partners.

Monitoring with instruments provides better data on how much rainfall is causing
landslides and when they are occurring. More importantly, monitoring also helps
scientists learn how water is moving in the hillside before and during a landslide.
Knowing what water is doing in hillslopes before and during landslides can lead
to better tools for predicting when landslides might occur.

The data-collection system installed at a typical site is designed to collect and

deliver data in near-real time and consists primarily of soil and hydrologic
monitoring instrumentation, a computer, solar power, and communications
equipment. The system reads and records sensor data every few minutes or
seconds, depending on the type of sensor, and sends it to a central computer
system where the data are downloaded, sorted, archived and graphed. Finally,
the data plots are posted on the USGS Landslide Hazards web site for access by
the general public. Scientists at the USGS analyze multi-year, annual, seasonal,
and short-term variations in the data to learn how the hillsides respond to rainfall
and how rainfall affects the potential for landslides on various time scales.

The monitoring part of the system consists of:

1. rain gages sitting on the ground surface.

2. water content sensors buried at different depths vertically beneath the ground
surface that measure how much of the soil's pore space is filled with water.
3. two or three tensiometers (shallow, mid, deep) located in boreholes near the
water content sensors that measure the amount of suction in the soil, soil-water
suction is what allows damp sand to hold its shape in a sand castle and helps to
hold soil on a hillside. The sensing tips of the tensiometers are placed at depths
to form a vertical array.
4. Piezometers installed in shallow boreholes cased with PVC at some sites where
a shallow water table is present. Piezometers indicate pressure below the water
table and can be used to observe changes in water table depth.

Not all sites have ground motion sensors, but several types of instruments can
be used to observe ground movement:

5. inclinometers installed in boreholes indicate when the ground is tilting.

6. lasers can indicate the movement of debris flows traveling down channels.
7. seismometers that sense ground vibrations produced when a landslide occurs.
 Can debris flows be predicted?
From the research using monitoring data collected at the near real-time sites,
scientists have learned many more details about the interactions of rainfall (and
snowmelt) and hillslopes, and are getting closer to being able to provide
information for a real-time warning system.

Some of the important lessons scientists have learned are:

 Seasonal variation in soil moisture affects the susceptibility of a hillside to

landslides.
 Wetness of the soil before a storm that triggers landslides affects the rainfall
threshold for an area.
 Low moisture content of hillsides in the dry season allows the hillsides to tolerate
much greater amounts of rainfall before sliding than during the wet season.
 Soil does not have to be completely saturated with water for landslides to occur.
 Positive pore-water pressure (which contributes to the initiation of landslides)
occurs at select locations on a hillside only briefly (hours) a few times per year
during heavy rainfall.
 Measurement of soil water content and water suction or pressure in hillside soils
gives a more accurate estimate of slope stability than rainfall or soil water content
measurements alone.

Scientists think that the onset of landslides is predictable several hours before
they occur using continuous measurements of rainfall, soil water content, and soil
water pressure, with the aid of mathematical models.